The problem would be that their loved ones DO depend on it. You have to get food, water, etc...all very quickly...all without injuring yourself.

99% of people would die if asked to be self-sufficient. Sure, you think you can make a part, but you are lacking the parts and tooling. If you did have those things, you would cut yourself badly doing manual labor for the first time in years.

After a day, you would be hungry, thirsty, tired, and stressed. The quality of your work would go down. This is a downward spiral that would not end well.

> I've had at least two UPSes add injury to insult by simply dropping dead> and failing to even act as a power strip, merrily cutting power to> everything attached to them despite mains power being available> (and every 'unprotected' device not even flickering).> Thanks a lot APC...

1. Cell phone towers can be redundant, independently powered, and well protected (as long as the protection does not interfere with radio signals.) The link to the "network" does not need to be a wire, it can be a microwave link to another terrestrial site, or to a satellite.

2. We keep saying: keep cell phone towers in reserve (in large office buildings) with their own power supplies so they can be (literally) rolled out, connected to its other parts, and started up after an emergency. This is unpopular with the major telcos, since it costs money.

3. We pioneered the 8-hour/24-hour install at Ericsson many years ago. We would get notice 24 hours before a site was supposed to go live that such-and-such government wanted cell service at such-and-such location. We would strap the cell site to the bottom of a helicopter, and deliver it the next morning. 8 hours after the crate touched the ground, the cell site was active. It's nice to have a cable running somewhere, but more often than not, we depended on microwave links.

One more thing...and this is a FCC policy thing...We could create an "emergency" mode where a quad-band cell phone will talk to any network in range, and where the networks can even load balance between themselves (so no network goes "down.") We have the hardware, it would just be a software patch.

Under Texas Law, YES, it is illegal to proposition a minor, where a minor is anyone You are not married to who claims to be under age. Even if You can see via webcam that grandma is old enough, the second she says she's under age You stop or You become a felon. (I don't know about computer generated characters.)

(Chapter 33 of the Texas Penal Code)

Of course, Your laws might vary. Not all of use live in Texas.

I will not touch the issue of international "commerce" not being covered by the Texas Penal Code. If they guys with guns and uniforms say it's covered, who am to argue the Supremacy Clause?

There are hundreds of tutorials on interfacing (PS/2, USB) keyboards to AVRs and to AVRs with Arduino Boot Loaders installed on them.

A cheap LCD would let your students see their accuracy in real time (WHICH IS CRITICAL!)

Now for the tricky part: You need a microcontroller, custom PCB, LCD, keyboard, battery, and charger for $50. It can be done. I could even build in some tutor programs for that price, but the $50 would be just for the parts.